


The other side of sadness;

by intrajanelle



Category: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi | Spirited Away
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 04:58:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1115789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrajanelle/pseuds/intrajanelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens after Chihiro and her parents walk out of the tunnel, or: a series of vignettes on life 23 years after they disappeared. Also featuring Kohaku as the naked boy in the river.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The other side of sadness;

**Author's Note:**

> This is in large part based on this text post (http://intrajanelle.tumblr.com/post/60907323941/redlanternzoom-ichikun-what-she-says-im) by redlanternzoom and ichikun. I've always wanted to write this because this entire idea just makes me so happy and satisfied so I hope I did it justice.

If Chihiro hadn’t been paying attention it wouldn’t have been obvious. The leaves on the car are her first clue. They’re painted to the windshield, stuffed in every crease of the stiff metal hood. When she notices the leaves everything else jumps out at her. The mold along the rims, the way the tires seem deflated as if they’d been holding their car up far longer than the two weeks her and her family had been trapped in the Spirit World. 

“Is this somebody’s idea of a joke?” her mom mutters.

Her father tries to wipe the worst of the foliage from the glass but most of it is caked on, as if their car is part of the scenery.

As she passes the statue that once smiled so cunningly at them, Chihiro sees how worn it is, how its smile is so much less sinister. She’s still afraid to touch it.

In the backseat their belongings are covered in dust, they smell like they’ve been sitting in a closet for longer than she’s been alive. Her bouquet is dead, once bright blooming flowers, shriveled sticks littered across the floor.

When their dad manages to get the car started it chugs at barely twenty miles per hour all the way to town.

*

Another family is all moved into their house and have been for fifteen years. At first her dad throws a hissy fit, all red-faced and loud-voiced over how not funny this is, but when the police show up and escort them to the station he gets quiet. Her mom wraps an arm around her shoulders and hides her face in Chihiro’s hair. 

*

The town is different too. Before, they only got a glimpse of it from the bottom of the footpath but Chihiro recognizes additions on the houses that had once been so small, tall office buildings where there had been parks, a red light district where her mom had gotten excited over a family-owned marketplace. 

At the police station the chief officer opens a thick file with their names on it, asks them if they’re related to the Ogino’s who went missing over twenty years ago. Her father, still red-faced but considerably quieter, seems to think this over before telling the officer that they’re relatives.

“It was in the will, the house, and their things—we’re here to pick them up?” he says, like it’s a question, and he smiles like everything’s fine.

*

There’s a building next to the station for things that have been confiscated during police activities. Most of their things are there, sans furniture, jewelry or anything of real value. That had gone to her dad’s younger brother the chief tells them with a light smile, but they know that already don’t they?

When they’re back in their car her mother’s tears spill over, running down her face is large messy rivers. She covers her face with her hands and her shoulders wrack with hiccups that force their way up her throat. Her dad rubs small circles on her mom’s back and tells Chihiro not the worry, everything’s going to be okay.

*

Her dad never does explain why he lied or if he even understands how they managed to miss 23 years of their lives without aging a day, but sometimes his eyes glaze over and he says something about mounds of food or a lady with a large head and Chihiro knows the knowledge is there, but knowing it could ruin the straight-laced man who raised her, so she’s quiet and doesn’t push him and comforts her mom when she has a nightmare that she was trampled by hundreds of gigantic pigs.

*

It’s 2014. Chihiro last remembers a warm summer day in 1991. 

Her family opens a flower shop, since all of her dad’s contacts and references as a lawyer are for a man who went missing 23 years ago and her mom is already adept at small business affairs. When her dad visits his younger brother for a loan to buy the shop he comes back with a black eye and 2,000,000 Yen. They never visit their extended family again. 

*

Chihiro doesn’t really mind 2014, the technology is tricky at first but she quickly gets the hang of it. She teaches her parents how to use their smartphones and navigates the Internet with the proficiency of a child who grew up on Apple computers. 

She looks up her old friends once, that’s when she misses 1991, when she goes on Facebook and sees her 33 year old former classmates with babies on their hips and husbands at their sides. She thinks if she just goes through that tunnel again she could come out in the past, if she could come out in the future she could come out in the past too, time is hardly a straight line. 

But every time she wanders too close to that footpath her mom seems to instinctively know. Chihiro’s cellphone will start chirping and her mom’s worried voice will spill toward her, telling her to come home, dinner’s ready, could she pick up some milk? 

*

A few years later they develop that land, tear down the tunnel, build a real theme park. 

Chihiro gets asked to go on a date there when she’s fifteen. She spends two days convincing her parents she’ll be fine and half the time she’s there checking every dark corner for No Face, every food stall for Frog Spirits. She thinks she sees a girl who looks like Lin, but when she approaches her the girl doesn’t recognize her, just smiles, says, “Do I know you?” and flounces off with her boyfriend when all Chihiro does is stare. 

When she sees the Kohaku River Memorial bridge stretching across a dry riverbed she starts blubbering all over the place and her date brings her home with no promise of a second night out.

*

She enters high school and then University without a smidge of anything peculiar happening to her. Sure, she can see spirits now. Her parents can too. She assumes it’s a bonus from being trapped in the Spirit World for so long. But they mostly leave her alone. 

They’re just little ghostly things with big eyes and O’s for mouths and they tilt their heads at her as she goes to school, sometimes trip her when they’re feeling mischievous, but otherwise keep their distance.

*

By the time she graduates University she’s mostly forgotten what happened those two weeks in the Spirit World. She can’t remember what Yubaba’s face looked like, only that her head was bigger than most. She can’t remember how to scrub a floor or the feeling of fresh sea air on her skin after a long days work or Kohaku’s voice. 

For years she remembers Haku almost perfectly, everything from his cropped hair to his brilliant eyes to the feeling of clutching at his scales as he zipped through the sky, but sometimes the memory is faded around the edges and she has to remind herself it wasn’t just a dream. Her only proof it was real is the hairband Zeniba wove for her. 

She wears is everyday for ten years but the evening she turns twenty it snaps, and it’s magic fades with it. 

Without Zeniba’s hairband those two weeks in the Spirit World become a distant memory, almost a dream, and from the moment the fragile elastic circle is broken Kohaku’s name slips from her memory as if it had never been there to begin with. 

 

*

By the time she graduates University she knows she was working toward a job in City Planning for a reason but she can’t for the life of her remember what it was. 

*

During these days when she still sees the tiny white spirits stalking her, she doesn’t know what they are but she assumes everyone can see them. One stumbles and falls off a chair in a cafeteria while she’s eating lunch with some friends and she laughs. When her friends ask what’s so funny she explains that the little white man slipped and they stare at her with narrowed eyes, ask if she’s feeling okay. She’s feeling fine and she never mentions the spirits again.

*

One evening, not too long after graduation, she’s taking a stroll with her boyfriend. She doesn’t know his last name, they’ve been dating for two weeks and names aren’t that important, except they are to her. When she asks him she tries to fit the pieces of his name and hers together and it just doesn’t feel right. He kisses her and its like everything she’s never wanted. 

She breaks up with him over coffee, resigns herself to the fact that she’s probably never going to fall in love and starts walking in the direction of the theme park she so often frequented as a teenager. 

She doesn’t stop walking until she reaches the dry shore of the Kohaku River. She remembers swimming in this river as a kid, she remembers almost drowning through the stories her parents have told her, and she remembers sea green eyes the same color the river once was, staring at her. 

*

Five hours, four coconut buns and three beers later the sun is creeping above the horizon and Chihiro has decided to restore the river. 

*

It takes months and millions of yen, but the city is overflowing with approval and support of the project. 

The big-wig city officials tell her its about time, that they miss the river they used to swim in as children, that they can’t wait to take their own kids there when its finished. She brings in all the best restoration workers. Doesn’t waste a single cent, holds fundraisers when she begins to run low on money. 

When its done she feels a sort of peace she hasn’t felt since she was ten years old, and then a naked man walks straight up out of the cool water and into her arms.

*

Its late, no one else is around to hear her scream or see her kick the naked guy back into the water, no one else is around to see the change that comes over her when Kohaku walks out of the river the second time. 

Second times the charm, she assumes, because this time when she sees Kohaku she remembers everything. She shouts his name, his true name, and throws her arms around him. Which is awkward because he’s pretty naked and wet and she slips and ends up half on top of him in the shallow end of the river so they’re both just wet, giggling catastrophes. But his arms cling to her tight like he can’t imagine letting go anytime soon and she feels something inside of her fitting back into place like a puzzle piece she didn’t even know was missing. 

*

She wraps him in her wet sweater and smuggles him into her apartment where he takes a two-hour bath. After which he sits under her kotatsu wearing one of her large t-shirts and a pair of her booty shorts that make his ass look like something sinful and she realizes with a start that he’s grown up too. 

Her second realization is that her crush on him has evolved from the innocent puppy love she had as a child to a full blown head over heels something out of rom com type of attraction that culminates in her insisting he live with her and then misinforming him that its perfectly acceptable for guys and girls with no romantic relationship to share futons and clothes and hold hands when they walk down the street. 

He doesn’t question any of this information, only tells her how the last decade of his life has been, how grateful he is that she restored his river and how he can’t be too far away from his river at any given moment. 

They make due with her studio apartment, only two blocks from the riverfront, and Kohaku gets a job as a lifeguard, which Chihiro finds terribly funny. She visits him at work, brings him lunch so that it doesn’t seem as if she’s only there to ogle him while he’s shirtless with a tight red bathing suit on, except she totally is, and then she teases him relentlessly to hide the fact that she blushes every time he stretches his arms.

*

They continue like this for a while and Chihiro is happier than she’s been in a long time, wouldn’t even mind nothing changing between them. 

She’s satisfied with answering Kohaku’s dozens of questions per day about technology and human customs and exactly how necessary wearing socks is. She loves showing him new things, the way his eyes widen and light up and he seems like a child again. She doesn’t mind just sleeping beside him, cherishes that they’re able to lie back to back and that she can feel him breathing through the cotton of her pajamas. But one day, everything changes. 

*

It starts when her and Kohaku are walking home from her work, she’s gotten in the habit of taking him with her when she can and showing him the foundations of all the news buildings she’s overseeing construction of and the wildlife reserve she’s working on right on the bank of his river. 

They’re holding hands with their fingers intertwined when a man and women on the other side of the street, hands mirroring theirs, lean toward each other and kiss. Chihiro blushes and almost turns away but Kohaku’s looking at her. 

Slowly, or at least slow in her mind, her churning thoughts make every second seem ten minutes long, Kohaku leans forward and downward. They’ve always been a pretty even height, even as kids, but he has a few centimeters on her now, just enough to surprise her when he softly kisses her upper lip. She closes her eyes and brings her free hand up to cup the back of his head and they’re kissing like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

*

They don’t really talk about it. From there they transition into a more romantic relationship without any vocal contemplation, as if it’s always been that way, as if there was never another direction for them.

* 

They’re always touching, brief strokes of their fingers on each others skin when they’re walking around their apartment, holding hands when they walk down the street, an arm around the others shoulder when they’re alone. 

*

When Chihiro introduces Kohaku to her parents it’s been five years since they started living together. There’s a certain kind of recognition in her mom’s eyes when she first sees him and Chihiro knows her parents don’t really remember anything that happened in the Spirit World but they might remember glimpses of sea-green eyes checking up on them as they rolled around in their pig pens.

Nevertheless, they love him and treat him like their own son, after much backslapping on her dad’s part and incessant questioning on her moms. 

They present him with a bouquet of pink daisies that Chihiro had ordered especially for him, from the flower shop her parents still run after all these years and he reads the card with reverence before tucking the whole bouquet into his lap for the entirety of dinner.

*

When the couple leave late that evening Kohaku slips the card into his pocket and holds the bouquet with the hand he isn’t holding onto her with.

“Yes,” he says once they’ve wandered close enough to the Kohaku River that she can smell the salt in the air.

She looks up at him and smiles and when he kisses her its like their first kiss all over again, but if she’s honest every kiss with him is like her first. 

When she takes the rings out of her pocket and slides one band onto his finger and its twin onto hers it feels like she’s not out of time, there aren’t little spirits cocking their heads at them from the bushes, there isn’t a whole other world out there that could claim them before they get their happy ending. There’s just the two of them and their river and they’re happy. 

She kisses him under the pale moonlight and then leads him home.


End file.
